Q&A: OhBree’s Andrew Scott

Posted on May 30, 2017

Recently, we had the chance to spend the afternoon with the lovely frontman of OhBree, Andrew Scott. We drank coffee, talked about Dungeons and Dragons, Stranger Things, and some super duper top secret Oh Bree projects. Andrew is that friend that you have who kind of knows everything. OhBree’s third full length album, Burn Bridges, Burn Pies was just released, and it’s just my cup of tea.

Deanna Soukiasian: Is Burn Bridges, Burn Pies the third full length release for OhBree?

Andrew Scott: It’s our third full length, and fifth release. We did two EP’s, one is kind of buried, I don’t think we put it on spotify or anything. I put out a record by myself, as the first record that Oh Bree did. I recorded it by myself, and then I asked all the other guys to learn the songs, and then we re-recorded some of the songs and wrote a bunch of new songs and put out out “technically” first album “We Miss you Edward”, and then we just tried to bury the crap out of that very first record, because me just doing it myself wasn’t that good.

DS: Is this album new territory for OhBree?

AS: I think the big thing is that our first record was really silly the whole way through. It was like 17 songs and every track was goofy as hell. Then our second record definitely got a little more depressing, well it got darker. It still had some goofy stuff on it too. But they were two pretty different feels. So this time we thought about how we had the two sides of the coin there and we really wanted to show them both on the same album. It starts out with some kind of somber stuff and then jumps into some high energy, I think sillier things, but some people might think it’s dark. To me it’s like a dark humor, I think it’s 100% funny, but some people will be like “that’s really dark”. The second song on the record is called “Spine”, and the chorus is just “you can’t feel anything when they break your spine, it just feels fine till the day you die”. Obviously it’s very dark sounding, but the point was that it’s played with this silly sounding circus music. I think saying something dark like that in the setting of music that’s silly is supposed to be more funny than dark.

AS: That’s a good question. I always really like doing vocals. So it’s usually the song, the melody, and then I can take those songs home, listen to them over and over again. Then we go in and do auxiliary percussion, which is my favorite. So we get the vibraslap, and that thing that the band, Cake, uses all the time. So when we did the first album “We Miss you Edward”, it was this big long goofy odyssey, and what I started doing was coming up with characters and singing songs from their perspective. So we had these songs sung from the perspective of some wacky character. In the second album we still did it, much not as much. When we got to the third album we realized there were a lot of connections between all of the records. So there were melodies, and lyrics we re-used from the second album. So when we finished the second record, we got a couple emails from fans that had these long, long, explanations for who they think each character is, and how they connect to other people and stuff like that. I was very shocked at how much people got into it.

DS: Oh my god, Were any of them right?

AS: That’s the thing. We didn’t really have a story, they were really characters all on their own. But as people were telling us what they think these characters are and how they might connect, we kind of decided “Yeah, maybe they do connect”. This is the first time that we planned out the rest of the story, we brought back at least four characters from previous songs. The first single that came out for us called “Tiny Tethers” is sung by this character, Edward (From Edward Come Home), about a character called Olsen. We don’t mention him before this album, but he is a recurring character, we did mention him by another name though. Also, this is a gapless album, all our albums are gapless albums. So between every song there is something that leads into the next one.

DS: When you are performing live how many breaks do you take or do you each take a separate break?

AS: We actually don’t do all the transitions like that for the live performance. We actually created a couple different transitions for the live performance so we could stick songs from different albums together and stuff like that. So I think there are only one or two album transitions we actually do live, the rest is just made up for the performance.

If you like fun silly weird stuff, you will love OhBree. When you fall in love with the new album (which you will) try to catch them live at Johnny Brenda’s in Philadelphia on June 24th!

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Deanna Soukiasian is an artist, musician, and writer for Acentric Magazine. Born and raised in the Greater Boston area she is a classic over reactor, and feminist killjoy who enjoys iced coffee in the winter.